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Problem with alfa awus036h

Hi everybody,

I have installed backtrack 5 and I have bought the awus036h alfa usb card.
I started the driver with the command:
modprobe -r rtl8187 && modprobe r8187
but when I launch iwconfig it doesn't mention the power management, neither the usb device appears to be recognised (there are no devices listed). Plus, if I launch airmon-ng, I can't see the phy0 or phy1 text near the driver column.
What can I do?

Re: Problem with alfa awus036h

Originally Posted by manacerace

I started the driver with the command:
modprobe -r rtl8187 && modprobe r8187
but when I launch iwconfig it doesn't mention the power management, neither the usb device appears to be recognised (there are no devices listed). Plus, if I launch airmon-ng, I can't see the phy0 or phy1 text near the driver column.
What can I do?

r8187 seems to have been removed from BT. I tried to install it a while back (so that I could activate the highpower funcionality), but I was unsuccessful and I didn't had the patience to search for a workaround. Either way, rtl8187 works great and you can set the txpower to higher values by typing "iwconfig wlan0 txpower #" on a terminal, where "#" can assume values from 0 to 20.

Re: Problem with alfa awus036h

I am having no issues with monitor mode on this card but I do not use it for connecting to networks as it seems to have connectivity issues.

Me too, the driver is very unstable for networking. I always use the internal card of my laptops for networking since it's more reliable.

Originally Posted by Scamentology

I am also able to set it as high as 30 - again this makes its stability suffer even more.

I only managed to hit 30dbm with r8187 driver. With rtl8187, if I try to input a value higher than 20 it throws an error.

Originally Posted by Pinns

Just curious, what will you be upgrading too? I was going to get the Alpha, but if I can spend a bit more and get better, I will.

The majority of the members of this forum seems to speak very good of Alfa adapters. AWUS036H, the one I have, works really well and out-of-the-box. But there are better and expensive ones, supporting 802.11n networks. Just be sure to check monitor mode and injection capability before buying.